Cuban Refugees At Guantanamo Caught In Web Of Hopelessness

November 7, 1994|By Myriam Marquez of The Sentinel Staff

'An Urgent Plea to Bill and Hillary Clinton,'' the black-and-white postcard states. It shows a thin girl with blond, wavy hair, playing her violin as several people crammed near a tent behind her look on.

The girl is 12-year-old Lizbet Martinez, who captured international attention when, during the August exodus of Cubans who fled that island on homemade rafts, she startled a U.S. Coast Guard crew as she pulled her violin from a plastic bag and began playing ''The Star Spangled Banner.''

The news cameras captured her touching rendition, and ever since Lizbet has become the poster child for the struggle to free Cuba of Fidel Castro.

Politics being politics, the 30,000-plus people who left Cuba on rafts ended up at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. President Clinton, rightly fearing a loss of U.S. sovereignty over its borders, ended the three decades' long practice of granting automatic political asylum to Cubans fleeing communism.

Clinton did what any other president would have done to protect U.S. borders and to save possibly hundreds of thousands of lives. For the short term, the Clinton policy fit the administration's political goals, too, at a time when illegal immigrants have become the scapegoats of an angry U.S. electorate.

But what now?

The Cubans in Guantanamo have been denied the option afforded every other immigrant group - the right to apply for entry into the United States, either as refugees fleeing political oppression or as immigrants seeking to join family.

We went from one double standard, in which Cubans were granted special treatment because of their communist plight, to another unfair standard, in which the Cubans at Guantanamo are cut off from basic human rights to apply for asylum.

Back to Lizbet. The postcard, prepared by Of Human Rights, an advocacy group, did have an effect. Recently, the Clinton administration made an exception for children at Guantanamo and those older than 70. They have begun applying for asylum to join their families or sponsors in the United States.

But most of the 23,000 Cubans at Guantanamo, plus the 9,000 being kept at refugee camps in Panama, still are caught in a web of hopelessness. Under the new U.S. policy, the only way those refugees could be considered for admission to the United States would be to go back to Cuba and then apply for entry.

The conditions at the Guantanamo camps, meanwhile, are improving, but so slowly that it makes you wonder what exactly Clinton plans for the long term.

Those are people who were willing to get on floating wrecks to flee Castro's Cuba, for heavens' sake, and the U.S. government expects them either to go back to that misery or to wait without hope for who knows how long at Guantanamo.

I suspect that, once the elections are over, Clinton will get ahead of the courts and change the policy regarding Guantanamo Cubans once again.

A federal judge already has blocked the U.S. government from returning any refugees who may say they want to go back to Cuba. Without granting an immigration hearing on each case, the judge ruled, the Guantanamo Cubans are being denied the basic human rights on immigration that all other nationalities enjoy when seeking to emigrate to this country.

One option the administration has overlooked is allowing Cuban-Americans to help those at Guantanamo build a free-market, democratic community there.

Revving up the economic engine at Guantanamo would show the Cubans on the other side of the barbed wire just what U.S.-style self-initiative and democratic reforms could accomplish for the rest of Cuba.

Imagine what a public-relations coup that would be for the U.S. government in its efforts to fight Castro's propaganda about ''Yanqui'' imperialism.

To their credit, the U.S. military leaders at the camps have let the Cubans pick their leaders and run makeshift hospitals, schools and athletic activities at each tent city.

The know-how is there. It's estimated that more than one-third of the Cubans at Guantanamo are doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers and other professionals.

What's missing are the materials and modern-day experience of Cuban-Americans who could help - without one cent from the U.S. government.

What's missing, too, is a fair U.S. immigration policy that would allow each and every refugee to plead his or her case without being penalized for having had the courage to take to the seas in search of freedom.